Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (59 page)

‘We are not in the business of revenge, manling,’ Khow warned Jacob. ‘Think of your son, as I must think of mine.’

‘I’m not a vindictive fellow,’ said Sariel from the rear of the party, ‘but any hell-hated stealer who thinks the prince of players is fit only to be served as a fine feast for a pride of sabre cats needs to be firmly disabused of such notions.’

‘For once,’ said Sheplar, ‘I am in agreement with the smelly one.’

It wasn’t revenge if you didn’t seek it out. Isn’t that how it worked, when the time came for a man’s soul to be weighed? And one truth Jacob knew. Major Alock would track them into hell itself, and wouldn’t rest until every member of the expedition was silenced for good. He would never stop. Alock was the king’s hand, and the king needed his part in Vandia’s slaving raids to stay secret. The expedition wouldn’t be able to travel in safety until Alock and his troopers were put in the dirt.

Khow moaned in disappointment at his companions’ barely suppressed violence. ‘How can you be so certain the major will not abandon his pursuit and return to Weyland?’

Jacob didn’t respond. A voice hissed the answer in his mind.
Because there’s only the thickness of a blade of grass between what he is and what you were.

Duncan allowed himself to feel a frisson of apprehension; in the air in the helo with the young Lady Cassandra and Paetro, passing through the mountain-sized concrete dwellings of the capital. This time they were on their way to the imperial city’s heart, the Diamond Palace. Cassandra Skar had been ordered to attend her mother at an import­ant feast day in honour of the emperor. The family rarely travelled together, Duncan had learnt from Paetro, to avoid presenting too tempting a target to the house’s enemies. This way, someone would always survive to lead the house in its revenge; which in itself was enough to give most of their adversaries pause for thought. They dipped and flew through a particularly foggy day; the city’s towers cloaked with white haze, broken by illumination from screens showing highlights of the previous day’s gladiatorial combats. The crowd’s roar filtered eerily though the gloom, distorted by stone and concrete canyons. Warning lights flickered on bridges carrying monorails, aerial walkways and electric carriage-filled roads twinkling through the mist. The air smelt of the sea that surrounded the capital; Duncan could lick the sheen off his lips and taste the salt. Once he might have felt homesick for the Lancean Ocean’s similar spray, a day’s travel by river­boat from his mansion. But those memories faded. This was real… this great mass of people at the heart of the imperium. It felt like the giddy core of human existence. Operating at a scale and sophistication that made Northhaven – or any city in Weyland – seem like a collection of mud huts inhabited by nomadic savages by comparison. Lady Cassandra rode the helo robed in a high-necked white fur dress that made her look like a snow queen from one of Duncan’s childhood books. Below it, he noted, she still wore a belt with pistol and short-sword, despite Paetro being similarly armed. Always ready for a fight, even on a trip to visit the emperor’s home.

Duncan could tell they neared the palace when the screens’ din dwindled away. A high-class neighbourhood. Propaganda and the constant distraction of violent entertainments were reserved for the teeming masses. Those in the higher castes needed little urging to cling to their power and position. The towering sides of the city fell away, a circle of parkland divided by walls tall enough to pierce the fog, battlements mounted by searchlights playing through the air. Duncan had to lean out of the side of the helo to get a look at the approaching structure. A great blue crystal needle rising ten thousand feet high, a sundial for the world’s centre. It split into spires knifing the sky, its top lost to the clouds above. Around this building – surely the Diamond Palace – rose three structures half the height. Each building made of multiple steel towers, their tops combined to form a steel ring-shaped runway that could be rotated to align against the winds. The surface of the rotary elevated airport was dotted with warships landing and taking off. The vessels looked like silver needles from this distance, but when one passed overhead, he could see they were similar in size to the monster that had transported the Northhaven slaves to the sky mines. After the warships had landed, platforms retracted into bays below the airport’s surface, concealing the craft. With the amount of firepower that could be launched from this airfield alone, the emperor was taking no chances with his security here. It seemed inconceivable any other nation of the world could mount a threat to Vandia’s ruler, but then, perhaps it was intended as a show of force for any of the emperor’s relatives who might be tempted to raise themselves through the ranks of imperial precedence by more
direct
means. Their helo banked past the steel towers holding up one of the ring-shaped runways, gun emplacements in the tower tracking their progress. Any threat the helo posed to the palace seemed mostly notional to Duncan. Even if they had been loaded with explosives and flew straight into the spire’s side, they would only leave the slightest of black scratches along its glass surface, like an insect slapping into a helo’s canopy. The fog carpeting the parkland swallowed them as they sank lower. Their three wheels bounced down on the tarmac of a landing field filled with hundreds of stationary helos. They left their pilot, Hesia, with the craft. She sat in the cockpit playing with a jab-stick, a common street weapon in the capital’s streets. A blunt knife-sized rod that could deliver a paralysing burst of electricity into a quarry. Duncan, Cassandra and Paetro entered the base of the Diamond Palace through the closest entrance, an atrium filled with a wall of lifts at the far end of a marble-floored hall. Before they were allowed to go further, the three of them had to submit to identity tests – even Lady Cassandra. A needle nicked their arms, drawing blood; the results shown on a screen visible only to a group of soldiers manning the turnstile outside the lifts. It took a minute, but they were allowed through. Duncan found it vaguely amusing that he was on file somewhere with the imperial security apparatus and judged fit as a mere house slave to accompany the young princess. If he had turned up here as Duncan Landor, son of one of Weyland’s wealthiest landowners, he would have been shown the interior of a cell. As part of Cassandra’s retinue, he was allowed to enter even the heart of the imperium. That lesson wasn’t lost on him. A crimson-uniformed retainer in the lift took the three of them to a ballroom.

Duncan was just one of many visitors on a transparent-floored gallery, the middle tier of about ten similar balconies overlooking a vast central space. It was a dizzying sight. Thousands of guests above and below, milling and circulating, slaves with trays of food and drink moving among them, the crowd’s voices joined in a single droning hum, rising and falling. Every hue of uniform and dress was on display, although Duncan didn’t doubt that below their finery the guests were as thoroughly armed as his young charge. He double-checked his footing in the transparent floor as though his feet might find a missing panel and fall through. Tall window-walls behind showed they were more than halfway up the Diamond Palace’s height, one of the tower-borne airfields below them, the lights of the fog-shrouded city just visible glimmering beyond. It was as though the rest of the capital was merely a hallucination created by and for the palace’s dreamers. Crimson-uniformed soldiers in leather masks lined the window, spindly rifles as long as lances and white ceramic shields with the wolf’s emblem adorning them. They were the same breed as the guards who had accompanied Apolleon to the Castle of Snakes’ laboratory. Hoodsmen, the emperor’s secret police. The group moved across the floor, stopping for the young princess to make small talk with other guests, Duncan checking the food from plates borne by waiting staff before he allowed it near Cassandra. Given how many hundreds of serving slaves were at work across the floor, with more emerging from service elevators every minute, and how fussily the courtiers grazed from the fare, it should have been almost impossible to ensure a specific guest received a specific serving. But almost impossible was still
nearly
possible. And Duncan knew enough about the house’s enemies to understand that there wasn’t much they wouldn’t stoop to in their efforts to remove Helrena and her young heir from the game of imperial politics. Duncan had grown fond enough of the young princess that he didn’t want to see her become a casualty in the perpetual struggle for the diamond throne.

Duncan leant in towards Paetro as the girl’s attention was engaged on a richly dressed couple, a gaggle of advisors and bodyguards waiting dutifully behind. ‘Everyone else has a larger retinue.’

‘More people to trust,’ said the soldier. ‘More ways in.’

‘With all Helrena’s wealth, why doesn’t she just move to the provinces? Go somewhere she can raise Cassandra in safety?’

‘Her wealth depends on her imperial licence to work the sky mines, lad,’ said Paetro. ‘You move away from the capital and the influence of the court, you will discover how quickly your wealth becomes someone else’s. Without money, you cannot fund a household guard and adequate security. And you will find distance offers little protection against ancient grievances and feuds. Believe me, if you leave, you are not running to safety. Quite the opposite.’

Duncan looked at the great crystal windows with their imposing view over the fog-shrouded city below, each pane elaborately engraved with scenes of victory triumphs from imperial history. ‘This isn’t a palace; this is a luxuriously-appointed prison.’

‘Perhaps it is,’ said Paetro. ‘But when you’re trapped on the board, better a knight than a pawn, eh?’

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Duncan. ‘You had a choice. You could have stayed happily at home and never set foot inside the legion.’

He shrugged. ‘My birthplace was boring. Life in the legions paid well and offered a promise of excitement. That’s where I met young Cassandra’s father. We saved each other’s lives more times than I can count. And I promised that I would look after his daughter if anything happened to him. Try and keep his wife alive too.’

‘What was Cassandra’s father like?’

‘Dangerous. He thought that rules didn’t apply to him. That he could grab the stuff of life, twist it, move it and change it. But rules are like gravity, they always drag you down in the end.’ He glanced at Duncan and frowned. ‘And when I see that look on your face, it reminds me a little too much of him. Aren’t you enjoying the party?’

‘That’s the trouble, I think I am.’

‘This is where history is made. You’re standing at the very centre of the universe. Being part of it can become addictive. This is the game… the greatest game, the
only
game. What would you have been at home?’

‘If I had stayed, whatever my father had told me to.’

‘I know you well enough to know that you weren’t staying,’ smiled Paetro. ‘You’re too similar to me, lad. I could have joined my brothers selling groceries in the market. Two pounds of apples, madam, or would you care for some potatoes today, perhaps? Is it time to sweep up the shop yet, or tally the stock? Every week identical to the next. That’s all you left behind. Drudgery and boredom. Yes sir, no sir. Another daily compromise on the road to hell. Instead, I cleared off over the border and signed up. In the capital you could live to see Helrena become empress one day, and Cassandra succeed her… the fate of nations forged. Having helped raise the future ruler of the world. How many people have done that? Young Cassandra as empress. Wouldn’t that be a thing to see?’

Duncan said nothing but the pang of guilt he felt inside answered for him.
It would be
.

Paetro nodded, contented. He understood. ‘Wars and plots and rebellions and intrigues on the same scale as this city.’ He stomped his boot on the floor. ‘We’re walking on glass, here, lad. And that’s
always
interesting.’ His eyes narrowed as another retinue approached where they stood. ‘And here’s a cure for a dull life if ever I saw one. Circae!’ He mouthed the last word like a hiss.

The couple that Cassandra had been talking with retreated a respect­ful distance as they saw who was bearing down on them. Paetro moved to Cassandra’s back, as did Duncan. The young princess’s grandmother cut quite a figure, sweeping forward in a purple silk dress swollen by a whalebone waist frame, a moon-shaped fan behind her dark hair, raised like a tower in elaborately tied bundles. Her face was pale, as was the fashion in the capital. Only those without wealth laboured anywhere a tan could be gained. Circae looked younger than her years, but an air of haughty superiority stretched her skin taut, marring whatever beauty had survived the march of time. She led a group of at least ten courtiers and guards closely attending her train, strutting as though they were the gathering’s centre of attention. Judging by the nervous and knowing looks the retinue were given as they passed, fans raised as cover for onlookers to gossip behind, they may well have been.

Circae halted before Lady Cassandra, her attention focused like a beam on her granddaughter – completely ignoring Duncan and the girl’s large bodyguard. ‘Ah, the newest jewel in the house’s crown. And the only one worth possessing. I am so glad to see you at court, my dear. Your mother keeps you far too isolated. We should see you here with a greater frequency.’

‘I will take my place at court one day,’ said Cassandra. ‘When I am of age.’

‘Your fate is to end up more than the caretaker of the Castle of Snakes,’ said Circae. ‘More than a gang-master to a mob of unmannerly sky miners. Half your blood is mine. And that is by far the greater half of you.’

‘Whenever I fail, I resolve to train more. And I know which half has missed the mark and which half has committed to fight harder.’

‘Do you know? I believe you may be confused,’ said Circae. ‘But in time you will understand, truly. You are not to be your mother’s creature. I will not allow it.’

‘I will choose as my father chose.’

‘Your father… my son? You did not know him, little lady. You do not know the man he was. He only had one weakness, and that was the one common to most of his gender… a low tolerance for the siren’s song. Your mother found that weakness and twisted it like a dagger until he died.’